Empty towns haunt imagination

By Greg Ansley

BALIBO - The girl in the photographs is aged 9, maybe 10, crisp in her white party dress with its lace of patterned pink flowers and her frilled ankle socks.

In one, she gazes out from dark almond eyes, dancing with a younger boy, a brother perhaps. In another, she poses, face full of mischief and hair pulled back, a dancing couple smiling at her from behind.

Are they her parents? Is that a baby brother's bootie tossed among the rubble that was once her home in Balibo, and which is now sealed for forensic examination of suspected atrocities committed within? Where is she now?

Where, for that matter, are Flora Martin, Maria Mau, Flexius Odja and Coriano Purificacao, whose pictures lie among the pile of ID cards at the rear of the house across the road, acrid with the stench of bodily fluids and blotched by dark stains.

Every noon, Australian Army padre Glynn Murray climbs the steps to the yellow Church of St Antonius, where 500 people in deeply Catholic Balibo used to worship, and rings the Angelus bell to entice the girl and her people to worship in safety.

Every day, so far, he walks back alone. No one comes, not even for the power of the Church.

Only one person lives in Balibo now, an ancient woman the soldiers call Mary for no reason other than that it is at least a name.

Mary is deaf, and speaks no known language or dialect.

For the first few days of the Australian occupation, she cowered in the dark of one of the few bamboo shacks to have escaped the terror, afraid even to take the food soldiers left at her door.

Now she accepts the food, but nothing more.

Apart from Mary, St Antonius and the stout walls of the Portuguese fort on the highest hill, there is nothing left of Balibo, which used to run north-south along the road from coastal Batugade to Maliana.

The little girl's white house sits stripped of its roof, stripped of its doors, windows and contents, save what the militia chose to smash rather than loot. A plastic baby's bath lies upturned, a school time-table is pinned to a wall.

The house was burned at the back: two pots still sit on the blackened remnants of the outdoor cooking area.

Above the white house are the remains of the house that bore the brunt of the Indonesian invasion in 1975, its walls pockmarked by the bullets of guns later turned on five journalists - one a New Zealander - caught in its path.

A trail of new blood runs up the steps to the ruins, flees through a rear room and vanishes in the volcanic dust and stones outside. It ends at a crumpled pamphlet, chanting the mantra of Pancisila - the Indonesian way.

Below the ruins, stretching in each direction, Balibo is empty and desolate: not a dog, a cat, a chicken.

Bamboo houses have been burned, one by one, leaving only exact squares of ash. The brick walls left standing are hollow shells, their insides shredded, smashed or burned.

In one ruin, a Portuguese Bible is open at Matthew 10:1: "Jesus summoned the 12 apostles and gave them all power over unclean spirits in order to expel these ..."

In Balibo the evil came, but was not expelled.

It spread out, east and south, killing, raping, pillaging.

This was no spontaneous uprising: this was planned, systematic, a bamboo Kristallnacht that destroyed utterly, house by house, street by street, town by town, from one end of the province to the other.

Those not slaughtered by gun or machete were herded west, across the border to the camps around Atambua and other towns where the militias still rule, or were driven into hills devoid of food or water.

Corrugated iron was stripped from roofs, countless tonnes of it, loaded on to trucks in a mammoth looting-spree of military precision and driven out - west, according to the people of Maliana, southeast of Balibo.

Some houses and villages on the highest ridges of the Ramelau Mountains have escaped, a handful of others inexplicably spared on the road winding along the coast from Dili to Batugade.

Some flying the Indonesian flag are unscathed, like an obscene Passover.

But this is an empty land.

Somewhere there are 500,000 missing people: the families who until a few weeks ago played with their children and grew old together in modest concrete brick houses and thatched bamboo huts.

Life has started to return to Dili, spilling westwards along the northern coast in a diminishing trickle to the town to Liquica, where Indonesian police pumped teargas into the church to drive those seeking sanctuary into the machetes of the militias.

Fifty-eight died.

Below Liquica, the road is deserted, kilometre after kilometre, the surviving houses empty of their owners in an eerie desolation broken only by the puff of dust as a goat trips into the shrub, or by oxen and cattle grazing untended paddies that should be under the plough now.

In one intact but deserted village, Australian soldiers found the tables laid for dinner, food on the tables, washing on the line, wood stacked for fires. "It was like the Mary Celeste," says Lieutenant-Colonel Mick Slater, commander of the Royal Australian Regiment 2nd battalion, now moving south along the border.

There are people at Batugade, 2km from the border, about 20 or so scavenging in the ruins of a town that looks, as one soldier says, like ground zero. A bomb could not have done more damage.

Trooper Shaky Mashayeckh hands out chocolate and muesli bars as more deaths are reported: three bodies washed ashore to be buried in temporary graves above high-water mark.

From Batugade, through Balibo to Maliana, there are no more Timorese.

But at Maliana, where the first armoured column has passed through only hours before, ragged cheers break out from a group of about 100 people at a church, others along the ridge passing through the town, and from a cluster of 50 or so trying to make shelter from the ruins.

Whatever lies ahead, the country that has been left with less than nothing - not even the hope of feeding itself for the year ahead - is one of joy, tears and a heart-clutching succession of hand-shaking and touching.

Vicente Centa looks at Major Dan Skinner and asks: "No more militia?"

Skinner slaps his Steyr rifle: "No more militia, no more Indonesia."